DeLay and Libby are small fry in the context of Washington misbehavior, and I personally believe that Libby is just a sacrificial lamb. The jury box doesn't help a lot when the *real* problems in question never see the inside of a courtroom.
No, my XP system also updated everything without a hitch. I wish I could have said the same for my MythTV box. Given that it's running a fairly up-to-date version of Knoppix, I would have expected that the timezone files would also have been up to date, but such was not the case.
On the other hand, the Gentoo box running Asterisk experienced no issues.
I agree - it was quite nice, although I was watching it from 40 miles west in Seminole County. It seemed to take forever getting off the pad without the benefit of SRBs. The staging was a bit difficult to see through the haze, and I could just barely make out the second stage ignition as a dim white star.
Being the true geek I am, I went back in and watched the webcast for another 40 minutes as the launch vehicle proceeded to spew satellites all over the place.:-)
I'm paying a comparable amount through Vitelity and I've been quite happy with the service. $1.49/mo. for each DID, 1.39 cents/min/channel outbound, and 1.1 cents/min/channel inbound. It's very much an ala carte service - you can order as many DIDs as you want for a single account, and if you want CNAM lookups (caller ID), you pay for them on a per-use basis (something like 2 cents/lookup IIRC). Most importantly for me, they actively support and welcome customers running their own PBX boxes (Asterisk , etc.) and they will let you have as many simultaneously active calls as your bandwidth will support.
I've had no problems with the service, and they were very helpful in porting my previous Vonage number over. They do offer a few other plans, but the ala carte offering worked best for me.
I rather suspect that if the City ran the power-plants and the substations, my lights would be on about 20 hours out of 24.
I'd be interested to see where that estimate came from. Where I used to live, we had a direct strike by Hurricane Charley (the eye passed less than seven miles away), and we experienced some pretty severe weather from the other three hurricanes that hit my area over the next. My power (provided by a municipally owned/operated utility) was out for a total of 10 hours across all four storms. Others in the same area with power provided by a private utility saw outages as long as a week. This isn't an indictment of the private utility by any means, but I think it's silly to say that a government-owned utility isn't capable of providing quality service. Also, in most localities that I'm familiar with it's the local government that provides water service, and you don't often hear of outages or problems with water quality.
If it's something that can adversely affect either votes or the tax base, most smart politicians will try their damndest to get it right.
Lemme correct myself before I get slammed - the Ethernet portion of the packet doesn't get transmitted, but rather is *generated* by the device that the recipient is connected to, and thus will have *that* device's MAC address. Thus, any packet you get will look like it's coming from the last Ethernet device in line before you.
It doesn't actually "vanish" per se, but rather is replaced by the MAC address of the router itself, which makes it just as useless as if it weren't there at all. I'm quite sure you already know that - I just was trying to make it a bit clearer for the OP.
Ray sounded like an egotistical dickhead for cutting the guy up for not knowing the meaning of the words "inculpated" and "exculpated"
The person being questioned holds a Ph.D. is a university professor, and whose validity as an expert witness was assumed in at least part because of his education, so I see nothing wrong with a lawyer poking at him a bit regarding his vocabulary or lack thereof. That's assuming that's what was happening - legalese has all kinds of words/terms that I'm not familiar with, and I have a larger vocabulary than most people I know, so I'd not be surprised if I had to have a few words explained to me during a deposition.
I'd not heard the word used before this, but it seemed quite obvious what "inculpated" meant just from the context in which it was used.
I'd expect you or any other PE would have called an all-stop on the situation at the beginning when given the MediaSentry and Verizon info, told to accept it as gospel, and then been expected to make sweeping declarations as Jacobson did.
As it turns out, his "method" -- if you want to call it that -- will be laughed out of any courtroom.
At least then his methodology will have some aspect that will be quantifiable:
"Dr. Jacobson, is it not true that the judge did in fact fall from the bench and roll about the floor laughing when presented with the lack of peer review and other basic scientific validation of your work in the UMG v. Lindor case?"
"Oh, and did you remember to record some EnCase logs THIS time?"
More importantly, who would pay for it? With the complexity of software today, you'd have to have multiple PEs on staff that intimately understood every part of the system in order to be able to have someone to sign off on everything with any degree of confidence. I don't think that's a practical solution for a development effort of any real size, especially given how often software people change jobs.
Requiring PE involvement in the software world might work to put some kind of (very welcome) brake on the reckless development practices that many companies follow, but given the added cost and added legal responsibility, I suspect it'd just end up decimating the domestic software labor pool and pricing custom software out of the reach of all but a few companies. Substantially more programs get built during any given year than bridges, after all.
In that case they should not be using the second website to verify online prices!
On the contrary, if they're verifying in-store pricing then they should be excluding any prices that are marked "online only" to avoid any possible confusion. As long as both websites are consistent on in-store pricing I don't see a problem.
From what I read in TFA it seems possible that someone could have been mistaking an online-only price with an in-store price. I don't trust BestBuy any farther than I can throw them, and for a variety of reasons I refuse to patronize them in any fashion, but it's not fair to lay blame where none may exist. If, on the other hand, they really are systematically trying to rip people off like that, I'd not cry if someone gave every store an unsolicited gift of a large quantity of thermite and some lit sparklers.
Actually what your hypothetical person demonstrated is that in that particular case honesty was not the winner in their moral argument. To say that it had no place is overstepping.
You're interpretation is technically more correct than what I said, but I'm not sure the semantic difference is particularly meaningful to the discussion at hand.
Now sure, it was dishonest, but that doesn't mean honesty holds no place in my value system. In that case it was a silly requirement that just served to weed out applicants.
Perhaps it was silly from your perspective, but sometimes the requirement for a degree is there for a reason other than just making your life more difficult. For instance, let's say you were put to work on a contract that specifies a degreed engineer in your position and it's later found out that you lied and didn't have that degree. Not only have you now risked getting yourself fired and having a nice big black mark on your work history, but it potentially opens your employer up to legal problems and other expenses that they could have avoided had you simply been honest. It's pretty damn presumptive of a candidate to take the decision about whether a degree matters away from a potential employer, as the candidate is assuming he knows the needs of the employer better than the employer itself.
It's rather like the dishonesty about skill sets that's also prevalent in the IT industry. If I need a Java coder, that means I want someone that actually knows Java well and can hit the ground running. I *don't* want someone that says they know Java, but really only has C++ experience and put Java on their resume "because Java's just like C++ and it's silly for me not to be considered anyway".
That said, when I complete my PhD in evolutionary biology in a few months my opinions on the subjects of ecology and evolution damn well better carry more weight than that of the average chump.
I don't know that just holding the Ph.D. should confer any more weight on its own (fallacy of appealing to authority and all), but I guarantee you'll be much more able to support your arguments with real data and cites than the aforementioned average chump, which is why *I'd* put more credence into what you might have to say.
Commerical pilots require credentials, engineers require them, as do physicians
But I've been flying Flight Simulator on a PC of one kind of another since I was in high school! Surely I could get by with fibbing about a commercial license, 3000 hours serving as PIC, and B737/B757 ratings? I just *know* I could fly that plane!
Lying about credentials on resumes is actually fairly common and some of those liars are the best performers ever hired. But you can bet that regardless of skill or merit they wouldn't be hired if they hadn't claimed to have the paper.
In my case you'd lose that bet, although I probably wouldn't quite represent myself as one of "the best performers ever hired". I've been a professional software developer for about 20 years now and have never had difficulty finding a job, even though my formal education extends only as far as the high school diploma that's packed away somewhere. Lest you think that all I've done is little bitty one-offs for individual clients all those years, I'll say that if you own an American car newer than about 7-8 years old, odds are that every time you get in you see the results of my code. The FCC uses my code to verify RF coverage and interference data for potential licensees. Checked yourself in at the airport using a self-serve kiosk? Some of my code was quite possibly in that system as well. What's more, in all those 20 years I've never had a need to lie about my credentials yet somehow I've managed to stay employed. Maybe it's magic, but I suspect it has more to do with me being competent at what I do, having a fairly good idea of what HR people are looking for, and knowing how to interview well.
You're arguing that the ends justify the means, and I flatly disagree. Lying about credentials may get someone's foot in the door, but I'd have no hesitation about bouncing their ass right back out when I found out about it. They've demonstrated that honesty doesn't have a place in their value system, and that their own well-being is more important to them than integrity. That's the kind of value system that lets corporate espionage, embezzlement, insider trading, and all kinds of other fun stuff flourish.
He could have been using a secure channel (VPN to his employer's network, etc.), but it wouldn't have done the first bit of good in this case because his machine itself had been compromised, thus the intruder could just read the stored e-mails directly without having to intercept any network traffic at all. Mail's encrypted with a passphrase? Not a problem - just log keystrokes and read at your leisure. The same is true for anything you might have had the forethought to have stored in an encrypted partition (TrueCrypt and the like).
Once someone has direct, unfettered access to your machine, all bets are off.
Dunno about you, but where I live there aren't any qualifiers in the laws covering kiddie porn that absolve one of the crime of possession simply because it was for a good cause. I don't imagine the argument "the ends justified the means" often flies in criminal court, jury nullification notwithstanding.
In other words when informed they do the correct thing about it.
How many of the targets of **AA action were afforded the opportunity to just say the same thing - "okay, sorry, I took it down, and it wasn't really meant for public consumption anyway, so we didn't do anything wrong", as opposed to being on the wrong end of a settlement demand?
...no one wants to talk to each other or solve shit because everyone is in their own little camp.
I perceive this as being one of the big stumbling blocks to more widespread acceptance of F/OSS alternatives to commercial software. Everyone's too busy showing their ass and having flamewars over stuff instead of working together and learning what the word "compromise" means. People are too busy saying "X sucks!" and trying to denigrate others rather than working towards a real solution.
Every time hardware improves, we don't use it to cut down power or anything like that. We use it to increase the number of operations we perform.
Not always. One can look at chips like the VIA EPIA and AMD Geode to see strides in that area. For instance, the project I'm working on right now uses PCEngines WRAP boards, based on the AMD Geode SC1100, which is basically a low-power 266 MHz 80486. Complete with 128 megabytes of RAM, a couple of gigabytes of CompactFlash storage, and a 802.11g mini-PCI card, it draws about 11 watts from a 7-18VDC wall wart and costs less than $200 to have a working system in a 6.5" x 6.5" x 1" case.
The problem is that not many consumers out there are clamoring for system performance equivalent to that of a machine from 10 years ago, even if they can run the system 24x7 for a power cost of less than $10.00 per *year*. People are more interested in stuff like Aero's eye candy.
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DeLay and Libby are small fry in the context of Washington misbehavior, and I personally believe that Libby is just a sacrificial lamb. The jury box doesn't help a lot when the *real* problems in question never see the inside of a courtroom.
As long as the First Lady is Sigourney Weaver, I'm for it.
No, my XP system also updated everything without a hitch. I wish I could have said the same for my MythTV box. Given that it's running a fairly up-to-date version of Knoppix, I would have expected that the timezone files would also have been up to date, but such was not the case.
On the other hand, the Gentoo box running Asterisk experienced no issues.
I agree - it was quite nice, although I was watching it from 40 miles west in Seminole County. It seemed to take forever getting off the pad without the benefit of SRBs. The staging was a bit difficult to see through the haze, and I could just barely make out the second stage ignition as a dim white star.
:-)
Being the true geek I am, I went back in and watched the webcast for another 40 minutes as the launch vehicle proceeded to spew satellites all over the place.
I'm paying a comparable amount through Vitelity and I've been quite happy with the service. $1.49/mo. for each DID, 1.39 cents/min/channel outbound, and 1.1 cents/min/channel inbound. It's very much an ala carte service - you can order as many DIDs as you want for a single account, and if you want CNAM lookups (caller ID), you pay for them on a per-use basis (something like 2 cents/lookup IIRC). Most importantly for me, they actively support and welcome customers running their own PBX boxes (Asterisk , etc.) and they will let you have as many simultaneously active calls as your bandwidth will support.
I've had no problems with the service, and they were very helpful in porting my previous Vonage number over. They do offer a few other plans, but the ala carte offering worked best for me.
I rather suspect that if the City ran the power-plants and the substations, my lights would be on about 20 hours out of 24.
I'd be interested to see where that estimate came from. Where I used to live, we had a direct strike by Hurricane Charley (the eye passed less than seven miles away), and we experienced some pretty severe weather from the other three hurricanes that hit my area over the next. My power (provided by a municipally owned/operated utility) was out for a total of 10 hours across all four storms. Others in the same area with power provided by a private utility saw outages as long as a week. This isn't an indictment of the private utility by any means, but I think it's silly to say that a government-owned utility isn't capable of providing quality service. Also, in most localities that I'm familiar with it's the local government that provides water service, and you don't often hear of outages or problems with water quality.
If it's something that can adversely affect either votes or the tax base, most smart politicians will try their damndest to get it right.
Lemme correct myself before I get slammed - the Ethernet portion of the packet doesn't get transmitted, but rather is *generated* by the device that the recipient is connected to, and thus will have *that* device's MAC address. Thus, any packet you get will look like it's coming from the last Ethernet device in line before you.
It doesn't actually "vanish" per se, but rather is replaced by the MAC address of the router itself, which makes it just as useless as if it weren't there at all. I'm quite sure you already know that - I just was trying to make it a bit clearer for the OP.
Ray sounded like an egotistical dickhead for cutting the guy up for not knowing the meaning of the words "inculpated" and "exculpated"
The person being questioned holds a Ph.D. is a university professor, and whose validity as an expert witness was assumed in at least part because of his education, so I see nothing wrong with a lawyer poking at him a bit regarding his vocabulary or lack thereof. That's assuming that's what was happening - legalese has all kinds of words/terms that I'm not familiar with, and I have a larger vocabulary than most people I know, so I'd not be surprised if I had to have a few words explained to me during a deposition.
I'd not heard the word used before this, but it seemed quite obvious what "inculpated" meant just from the context in which it was used.
I'd expect you or any other PE would have called an all-stop on the situation at the beginning when given the MediaSentry and Verizon info, told to accept it as gospel, and then been expected to make sweeping declarations as Jacobson did.
As it turns out, his "method" -- if you want to call it that -- will be laughed out of any courtroom.
At least then his methodology will have some aspect that will be quantifiable:
"Dr. Jacobson, is it not true that the judge did in fact fall from the bench and roll about the floor laughing when presented with the lack of peer review and other basic scientific validation of your work in the UMG v. Lindor case?"
"Oh, and did you remember to record some EnCase logs THIS time?"
More importantly, who would pay for it? With the complexity of software today, you'd have to have multiple PEs on staff that intimately understood every part of the system in order to be able to have someone to sign off on everything with any degree of confidence. I don't think that's a practical solution for a development effort of any real size, especially given how often software people change jobs.
Requiring PE involvement in the software world might work to put some kind of (very welcome) brake on the reckless development practices that many companies follow, but given the added cost and added legal responsibility, I suspect it'd just end up decimating the domestic software labor pool and pricing custom software out of the reach of all but a few companies. Substantially more programs get built during any given year than bridges, after all.
In that case they should not be using the second website to verify online prices!
On the contrary, if they're verifying in-store pricing then they should be excluding any prices that are marked "online only" to avoid any possible confusion. As long as both websites are consistent on in-store pricing I don't see a problem.
From what I read in TFA it seems possible that someone could have been mistaking an online-only price with an in-store price. I don't trust BestBuy any farther than I can throw them, and for a variety of reasons I refuse to patronize them in any fashion, but it's not fair to lay blame where none may exist. If, on the other hand, they really are systematically trying to rip people off like that, I'd not cry if someone gave every store an unsolicited gift of a large quantity of thermite and some lit sparklers.
Actually what your hypothetical person demonstrated is that in that particular case honesty was not the winner in their moral argument. To say that it had no place is overstepping.
You're interpretation is technically more correct than what I said, but I'm not sure the semantic difference is particularly meaningful to the discussion at hand.
Now sure, it was dishonest, but that doesn't mean honesty holds no place in my value system. In that case it was a silly requirement that just served to weed out applicants.
Perhaps it was silly from your perspective, but sometimes the requirement for a degree is there for a reason other than just making your life more difficult. For instance, let's say you were put to work on a contract that specifies a degreed engineer in your position and it's later found out that you lied and didn't have that degree. Not only have you now risked getting yourself fired and having a nice big black mark on your work history, but it potentially opens your employer up to legal problems and other expenses that they could have avoided had you simply been honest. It's pretty damn presumptive of a candidate to take the decision about whether a degree matters away from a potential employer, as the candidate is assuming he knows the needs of the employer better than the employer itself.
It's rather like the dishonesty about skill sets that's also prevalent in the IT industry. If I need a Java coder, that means I want someone that actually knows Java well and can hit the ground running. I *don't* want someone that says they know Java, but really only has C++ experience and put Java on their resume "because Java's just like C++ and it's silly for me not to be considered anyway".
That said, when I complete my PhD in evolutionary biology in a few months my opinions on the subjects of ecology and evolution damn well better carry more weight than that of the average chump.
I don't know that just holding the Ph.D. should confer any more weight on its own (fallacy of appealing to authority and all), but I guarantee you'll be much more able to support your arguments with real data and cites than the aforementioned average chump, which is why *I'd* put more credence into what you might have to say.
Commerical pilots require credentials, engineers require them, as do physicians
But I've been flying Flight Simulator on a PC of one kind of another since I was in high school! Surely I could get by with fibbing about a commercial license, 3000 hours serving as PIC, and B737/B757 ratings? I just *know* I could fly that plane!
He has helped to produce one of the best information sites in the world.
Well, that is as may be, but this article is about Wikipedia.
[+1, Quote of the Day]
Lying about credentials on resumes is actually fairly common and some of those liars are the best performers ever hired. But you can bet that regardless of skill or merit they wouldn't be hired if they hadn't claimed to have the paper.
In my case you'd lose that bet, although I probably wouldn't quite represent myself as one of "the best performers ever hired". I've been a professional software developer for about 20 years now and have never had difficulty finding a job, even though my formal education extends only as far as the high school diploma that's packed away somewhere. Lest you think that all I've done is little bitty one-offs for individual clients all those years, I'll say that if you own an American car newer than about 7-8 years old, odds are that every time you get in you see the results of my code. The FCC uses my code to verify RF coverage and interference data for potential licensees. Checked yourself in at the airport using a self-serve kiosk? Some of my code was quite possibly in that system as well. What's more, in all those 20 years I've never had a need to lie about my credentials yet somehow I've managed to stay employed. Maybe it's magic, but I suspect it has more to do with me being competent at what I do, having a fairly good idea of what HR people are looking for, and knowing how to interview well.
You're arguing that the ends justify the means, and I flatly disagree. Lying about credentials may get someone's foot in the door, but I'd have no hesitation about bouncing their ass right back out when I found out about it. They've demonstrated that honesty doesn't have a place in their value system, and that their own well-being is more important to them than integrity. That's the kind of value system that lets corporate espionage, embezzlement, insider trading, and all kinds of other fun stuff flourish.
"Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor, not a mechanic!! Oh, wait..."
or
"This is normally a 5 hour surgical procedure, but I'll have you buttoned up in two!"
He could have been using a secure channel (VPN to his employer's network, etc.), but it wouldn't have done the first bit of good in this case because his machine itself had been compromised, thus the intruder could just read the stored e-mails directly without having to intercept any network traffic at all. Mail's encrypted with a passphrase? Not a problem - just log keystrokes and read at your leisure. The same is true for anything you might have had the forethought to have stored in an encrypted partition (TrueCrypt and the like).
Once someone has direct, unfettered access to your machine, all bets are off.
Dunno about you, but where I live there aren't any qualifiers in the laws covering kiddie porn that absolve one of the crime of possession simply because it was for a good cause. I don't imagine the argument "the ends justified the means" often flies in criminal court, jury nullification notwithstanding.
On the other hand, is it not perfectly legal to consider someone in breach of their lease if they engage in criminal activity on the premises?
In other words when informed they do the correct thing about it.
How many of the targets of **AA action were afforded the opportunity to just say the same thing - "okay, sorry, I took it down, and it wasn't really meant for public consumption anyway, so we didn't do anything wrong", as opposed to being on the wrong end of a settlement demand?
...no one wants to talk to each other or solve shit because everyone is in their own little camp.
I perceive this as being one of the big stumbling blocks to more widespread acceptance of F/OSS alternatives to commercial software. Everyone's too busy showing their ass and having flamewars over stuff instead of working together and learning what the word "compromise" means. People are too busy saying "X sucks!" and trying to denigrate others rather than working towards a real solution.
Every time hardware improves, we don't use it to cut down power or anything like that. We use it to increase the number of operations we perform.
Not always. One can look at chips like the VIA EPIA and AMD Geode to see strides in that area. For instance, the project I'm working on right now uses PCEngines WRAP boards, based on the AMD Geode SC1100, which is basically a low-power 266 MHz 80486. Complete with 128 megabytes of RAM, a couple of gigabytes of CompactFlash storage, and a 802.11g mini-PCI card, it draws about 11 watts from a 7-18VDC wall wart and costs less than $200 to have a working system in a 6.5" x 6.5" x 1" case.
The problem is that not many consumers out there are clamoring for system performance equivalent to that of a machine from 10 years ago, even if they can run the system 24x7 for a power cost of less than $10.00 per *year*. People are more interested in stuff like Aero's eye candy.